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The Postcolonial Condition of Names and Naming Practices in Southern Africa represents a milestone in southern African onomastic studies. The contributors here are all members of, and speakers of, the cultures and languages they write about, and, together, they speak with an authentic African voice on naming issues in the southern part of the African continent. The volume’s overarching thesis is that names are important yet often underestimated socio-politico-cultural sites on which some of the most significant events and processes in the post-colony can be read. The onomastic topics covered in the book range from the names of traditional healers and male aphrodisiacs to urban landscapes a...
This book addresses the ways in which writers deploy the trope of contested criminality to expose Zimbabwe's socially and politically oppressive cultures in a wide range of novels and short stories published in English between 1994 and 2016. Some of the most influential authors that are examined in this book are Yvonne Vera, Petina Gappah, NoViolet Bulawayo, Brian Chikwava, Christopher Mlalazi, Tendai Huchu and Virginia Phiri. The author uses the Zimbabwean experience to engage with critical issues facing the African continent and the world, providing a thoughtful reading of contemporary debates on illegal migration, homophobia, state criminality and gender inequalities. The thematic focus o...
In November 1965, Ian Smith's white minority government in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) made a unilateral declaration of independence, breaking with Great Britain. With a European population of a few hundred thousand dominating an African majority of several million, Rhodesia's racial structure echoed the apartheid of neighboring South Africa. Smith's declaration sparked an escalating guerrilla war that claimed thousands of lives. Across the Atlantic, President Lyndon B. Johnson nervously watched events in Rhodesia, fearing that racial conflict abroad could inflame racial discord at home. Although Washington officially voiced concerns over human rights violations, an attitude of toleranc...
The book exposes various mechanisms and methods by which covert colonial mechanisms are employed to perpetuate colonialism, especially in Africa. Less overt and more covert perpetuation of colonialism is done through the use of networks. The main achievement of the initial phase of colonialism was the establishment of networks that are nefarious and omnipresent; constituting “distributed presence,” which allows for “action at a distance.” As a result, colonial subjects became willing participants in these processes, unbeknownst to them, which perpetuated their own colonialism. The book exposes forms of colonialism where manufactured consent is used to perpetuate colonialism. Trapped in this capitalist, Western, Christian language and moral world order without sovereignty, African countries continuously sink deeper into the colonial quagmire.
This book investigates the intersections between education, social justice, gendered violence and human rights in South African schools and universities. The rich and multifarious tapestry of scholarship and literature emanating from South African classrooms provides a fascinating lens through which we can understand the complex consequences of the economies of education, social justice imperatives, gendered violence in the lives of women and children, and marginalised communities. The scholarship in the book challenges readers to imagine alternative futures predicated on the transformational capacity of a democratic South Africa. Contributors to this volume examine the many ways in which so...
Colonial scholars have taken immense pleasure in portraying Africans as possessed by spirits but as lacking possession and ownership of their resources, including land. Erroneously deemed to be thoroughly spiritually possessed but lacking senses of material possession and ownership of resources, Africans have been consistently dispossessed and displaced from the era of enslavement, through colonialism, to the neocolonial era. Delving into the historiography of dispossession and displacement on the continent of Africa, and in particular in Zimbabwe, this book also tackles contemporary forms of dispossession and displacement manifesting in the ongoing transnational corporations land grabs in A...
Aging Studies and Ecocriticism: Interdisciplinary Encounters argues that both aging studies and ecocriticism address the complex dynamics of individual and collective agency, oppression and dependency, care and conviviality, vulnerability and resistance as well as intergenerationality and responsibility. Yet, even though both fields employ overlapping methodologies and theoretical frameworks and scrutinize “boundary texts” in different literary genres, which have been analyzed from ecocritical perspectives as well as from the vantage point of critical aging studies, there has been little scholarly interaction between ecocritical literary studies and aging studies to date. The contributors in this volume demonstrate the potential of specific genres to narrate relationality and age, and the aesthetic and ethical challenges of imagining changes, endings, and survival in the Anthropocene. As the first step towards putting both fields in conversation, this collection offers new pathways into understanding human and nonhuman ecological relations.